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Psychoanalytic Liberation Psychology
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Has anyone ready Psychoanalytic Liberation Psychology by Nick Malherbe? Care to share your thoughts? Comments? Criticisms?

I’m a first year graduate student and am in a psychodynamic class and also an integral yoga/multicultural counseling class. I’m finding myself having a hard time connecting to psychodynamics so far (only really have gone over some Jung, Freud, Winnicott, and this week Kohut). There’s pieces of psychoanalytic theory and depth psychology that I feel passionate about and want to incorporate into my practice one day, but there’s also a part of me that is so disgusted by the history of psychoanalysis and its complicity with injustice and capitalism that it’s preventing me from wanting to better understand psychoanalytic theory beyond what I currently know now (which is pretty surface level but still feels powerful.) ESPECIALLY when it comes to Jung. I know he’s extremely foundational to depth psychology, but I can’t get myself to give AF about what he has to say because of how much of a horrible person he was and how all his theories were built through a lens of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

Anyone else have moments like this in graduate school? I’ve started looking for literature that incorporates anti-capitalist liberation psychology and psychoanalysis/psychoanalytic theory and it seems like the Nick Malherbe piece I’ve mentioned is a good place to start.

Thanks in advance!!


Originally posted by u/harnessurhopes on Reddit.


Top comment by u/ASoupDuck

I haven't read the book you're referencing but I personally found these 2 really great at exploring cases+theories from leftist psychoanalytic perspectives:

Psychoanalysis in the Barrios: Race, Class and the Unconscious edited by Patricia Gherovici, Christopher Christian

Psychoanalysis under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine - Lara Sheehi, Stephen Sheehi

I haven't read it yet but I have The Capitalist Unconscious: Marx and Lacan by Samo Tomsic on my list.

Personally I did not like Jung much either, I have meanwhile really loved Lacan's work, though a bit of a project to understand it all.

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